Search form

You are here

Facebook Set to Push Hardcore Games

While Facebook might be seen as the spiritual home of the extremely casual and social game, the director of Game Partnerships at the social network, Sean Ryan, has made it clear that the next year will see a shift to something a little more "core," than in the past.

"The next 6-to-12 months, it's about core and mid-core," Ryan said while speaking with Venturebeat. "Not because the other genres aren't good, but when we look at openings on the platform where we think we can deliver a powerful experience alongside our developers… As we start to see Unity and Flash 11 become more prevalent, we can have a really rich gaming experience."

With mobile phone platforms like Android and iOS offering high quality, 3D games much more akin to what would be termed "hardcore," it seems surprising that Facebook hasn't begun integrating more impressive titles already - especially considering Unreal Engine 3 has been compatible with the latest version of Flash for some time now.

Perhaps a Facebook version of Infinity Blade won't be too far away.

However the question needs to be asked, will people really play more engaging games through Facebook? Many of those that enjoy Facebook "games," tend to be those that enjoy ones that are more akin to social clicking experiments - like Farmville - than actual games.

Do you guys think hardcore belongs on social networks? Will you play them when they appear?

lol I was thinking something similar... force publish screenshots, force friend invite, special game currency, ads everywhere, stupid suggestions all time to promote the game by yourself, etc etc.. Recently I played Airport City in android and this game represents everything what I've just mentioned, hardcore. Result = 5 minutes later uninstalled.

Yes, because the internet is a wasteland of perverts and criminals and we must safeguard every little thing about us or we'll wake up in some sickos torture lab, right? Conservative fear-mongering luddite...

Personally myself i think it will ruin the gaming industry of good games because at the moment all the games are on either pc, console or mobile phones which makes a good balanced market for their respective creators. If facebook move into this industry there wont be much for the games and pc/console/mobile market because all 3d high quality graphic games will be on facebook and possibly other social networking websites as they will jump on the same bandwagon thus rendering consoles, gaming spec pc's and mobile platform's useless in the near future.

I'm not sure what you think facebook is but I'll tell you what it's not. Facebook is not a service like OnLive which renders high end hardware pointless, nor does anyone plan to turn it into such. The technologies mentioned here (Unity and Unreal 3) are both 3d engines that can be run inside a flash wrapper. Meaning you still need a high end machine to run a high specs game because its still your PC running the games, also you'd have to download several large files in order to get quality graphics, sounds etc...

Unity doesn't USE any one technology, you develop your game with it then choose an export target (windows, ios, android, flash). Version 3 had beta support for flash export soon after release. Today it probaly is already finished and even if its not, it will be once unity 4 is out which is a few months away. Check your facts before posting plz, its as simple as downloading unity and exporting one of their demo projects like 'angry bots' to flash then embedding it on an html page and opening it with your browser.

yes i think this is more than just a possibility..they talk about 3d engines but as far as i can see..many 3d games are already ****. A big technological jump doesnt automatically lead to hard-core games, they are not even able to develop hard-core games on traditional platforms..i hardly think any "serious" developer will decide to make decent games on facebook, not to mention the fact that facebook games are more of the freemium kind..not exactly what i call hard-core gaming.
if my message doesnt make sense..sorry for my bad english :D